Florida car guards to be registered

We are all familiar with the sight of (and sometimes frustration with) car guards offering to watch our cars for a small donation at a mall parking lot.

They make up a significant portion of South Africa’s informal sector and as it stand, both informal and formally employed guards are entirely unregulated. This opens them up to being easily exploited. Car guards have been included in the provisions for the private security sector in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act since 2009 and are thus entitled to a minimum wage of R2 500 per month, although they do not often earn that. Guards working at malls may earn up to R4 500 per month but they have to pay certain fees, resulting in a loss of income. To counter this loss, they often harass motorists aggressively to pay them instead of just driving away.

Training and registration programmes for car guards are very expensive, leaving them with little or no protection of their livelihood. The police have little control over car guards’ actions towards motorists.

Florida Police have requested a project management company, Flomotion, to start a registration programme to get all car guards in the Florida Central Business District (CBD) vetted by the police and enter their details into a database. Hopefully it will become a pilot project that could be copied in other areas in and around Johannesburg and even countrywide.

The proposed programme will include criminal background checks on all registered guards, safety training for the guards with weekly follow-ups, identity badges and reflective jackets for them, and becoming part of an effective communication system between them, the police and Community Policing Forums (CPFs). As soon as this programme is implemented, the Florida CPF will take over the ongoing monitoring and administration of the programme.

The appeal of this programme is the availability of training, official recognition and the guards becoming the police’s on-the-ground network of eyes and ears. The guards will not pay exploitative fees to work in the Florida CBD and will report to the Florida CPF.

Ward 70 councillor Caleb Finn is very excited about this programme. “I believe this programme is a positive step in the process of improving the Florida CBD and ensuring that we formalise our approach towards safety and security in this area. We know that when an area is safe, secure and functioning well, it attracts investment. I would like to thank the Florida CPF, Florida Police and Flomotion for this initiative and believe it will yield great results for the car guards and community as a whole,” he said.

Do you perhaps have more information pertaining to this story? Email us at roodepoortrecord@caxton.co.za (remember to include your contact details) or phone us on 011 955 1130.

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